Limiting the Social:Constructivism and Social Knowledge

in International Relations

Javier Lezaun

I n their respective articles in the Spring 2002 issue ofInternational StudiesReview(4, No. 1), Theo Farrell and Jennifer Sterling-Folker demonstratethat the conversation between constructivism and traditional approaches in

international relations (IR) has reached a stage of fruitful exchange and sophis-ticated analysis. Both authors persuasively address constructivism on some ofthe central issues and assumptions that confront IR scholars.1

The fruitfulness of this debate for IR is sufficient to justify its continuation,regardless of the increasing looseness with which “constructivism” is beingused today in many fields and disciplines. Claims about the theoretical incom-mensurability of constructivism and traditional rationalist approaches to thecontrary, the practical truth is that, first, there already exists a substantial bodyof constructivist work in IR that engages with the central issues of the disci-pline, and, second, that scholars from opposing traditions find the challenge ofconstructivism productive, or at least thought provoking.

Theo Farrell’s outline of a constructivist approach to security studies is agood example of the contributions that constructivism can make to traditionalIR concerns. Farrell traces the “culturalist” lineage of current constructivismand demonstrates that, paraphrasing Kenneth Waltz, constructivism is able toaccount for some big and important things in international relations. Farrellconvincingly presents the contributions that this approach can make to some ofthe “puzzles” in hegemonic IR theories: the role of uncertainty in constitutingthe security dilemma, the interpretive construction of threat in “balance of power”theories, the causes of liberal democratic peace, and the isomorphism in mili-

1Theo Farrell, “Constructivist Security Studies: Portrait of a Research Program,”and Jennifer Sterling-Folker, “Realism and the Constructivist Challenge: Rejecting,Reconstructing, or Rereading.”

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tary development across the world. On this basis, he concludes that construc-tivism is now “a progressive research program.”

It is difficult to find any fault in Farrell’s programmatic outline, althoughwe could deduce from it that there is little new or, by the same token, challeng-ing in recent constructivist claims. Rather than confrontation or cooperationwith rationalism, the fate of constructivism, in Farrell’s epistemologically con-ventional formulation, could easily be coexistence, if not outright subordina-tion. As he himself recognizes, rationalist IR theories could develop auxiliaryassumptions to incorporate much of thecontentof international relations thatconstructivist approaches describe. For example, John Ruggie has argued thatneorealist and neoliberal authors have for some time introduced “ideationalfactors” as ad hoc, often undertheorized, determinative factors.2 Moreover, wecould read Farrell’s argument as implying an unequal division of labor betweenconstructivist and rationalist (particularly neoliberal) theories. The constructiv-ists would describe the historical processes of identity formation, while therationalists would account for the actualbehaviorof international actors, byeither incorporating these ideational factors into their models or using construc-tivist analysis to explain the historicalorigin of actors’ identities and interests.It is clear that this is not what Farrell wants to argue. As any constructivistwould do, he wants to claim that this research program has something substan-tial and substantially different to say aboutaction in the international system.But his tactical effort to make constructivism useful and commensurable torationalist approaches blunts the edge of the challenge that constructivism canpose to traditional IR.

Jennifer Sterling-Folker tackles in her article the challenge of constructiv-ism to the realist paradigm and does so by circumscribing, in precise and con-vincing terms, the explanatory reach of realism when left to its own devices.Drawing on the ontology of evolutionary biology and genetics, Sterling-Folkerargues that realism is particularly good at explaining theprocessof institutionalchange, the boundaries and ultimate form of this process, but that it lacks ana-lytical resources to account for the specificcontentof this change, the actualsocial reality produced through state action. Social construction will, so to speak,fill up the vessel of a realist explanation of the interaction process (group for-mation and its consequences). Interaction is fundamentally constrained by thebiological constitution of the actors involved.

Realists will probably contest Sterling-Folker’s rereading of their explana-tory scope and the division of labor that it entails, claiming that they are able toaddress the content of international relations, too. But, more important for myargument here, constructivists also have much to challenge in Sterling-Folker’s

2John Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neoutilitarianism and theSocial Constructivist Challenge,”International Organization52, No. 4 (1998).

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reading of their own limitations. For example, Sterling-Folker’s argumentincludes a certain reluctance to recognize the ontological status of the socialand the limits that social practices and institutions impose on the realm of thepossible. This is probably due to the fact that the social is in most cases reducedhere to its ideational elements, sometimes even equated with the imaginary—asif society happened, primarily and fundamentally, in actors’ minds.

Sterling-Folker similarly characterizes constructivism as dealing exclu-sively with identities, norms, understandings, sentiments, and subjective beliefs,while the material, the “real-out-there,” is understood as belonging to the domainof the biological. Only in this light is it possible to understand the claim thathuman social activity “cannot be a limitation [on the socially possible] in itselfsince there are presumptively no biological boundaries to the social practiceswe imagine and to what we construct socially. In the absence of recognizedboundaries on the imagination, there is no reason to anticipate any stasis orisomorphism to human social practices.”

The unwillingness to recognize thehardnessof the social leads Sterling-Folker and other critics of constructivism to a series of reductions. It leads herto the assumption that constructivism is good at explaining change but insuffi-cient to account for stasis or stability. It is also the only reason why she mustresort to the biological in her search for “boundaries on the socially possible.”If the social has a dreamlike character, the bedrock for our causal explanationsmust be found elsewhere. But this need not be the case. Johann Wolfgang vonGoethe’s famous dictum, “In the beginning was the deed,” which Sterling-Folker mentions in her reading of Nicholas Onuf ’s work, does not imply thatthe social is something infinitely amorphous or inherently unstable.

Nor does the biological (which is sometimes conflated in Sterling-Folker’sarticle with “the psychological,” “the material,” “the human body,” or “an implicitperspective on human nature”) comprise fixed facts and processes on whichunproblematic explanations could be founded. Quite the contrary. I would expectthat if IR scholars were to try to define what constitutes “the biological” and itsrole in international relations, the result would be additional controversies anddisputes that would add nothing to the capacity of IR to explain the inter-national social order. Sterling-Folker’s key paradigms, evolutionary biologyand genetics, are no exception in this respect. Would IR need to engage, forinstance, in the ongoing debates over the nature of the gene and its role ininheritance or development, or over the specific mechanisms of selection? Orshould IR simply import the latest popular (and simplistic) version of our knowl-edge of biological processes? And which one of the versions currently availableshould we choose? My point here is that what in theory and abstract termsmight look like bedrock for IR could easily turn in practice into a quagmire.

To summarize, Sterling-Folker’s call for a better understanding of “the inter-relation of the biological, cognitive, and social” is worth consideration by anyscholar. It is not clear to me how fruitful this daunting enterprise would be for

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IR in its efforts to understand what ischaracteristicandspecificto the inter-national order. Yet her rereading of realism and of the role of social practices indetermining the content of international reality is so convincing that if we alsoacknowledge the solidity of social boundaries—and aim precisely to under-stand how these boundaries are produced and sustained—there will be, in myopinion, very little left to be explained by approaches that ignore the role ofsocial practices and knowledge in the international system.

As both articles clearly demonstrate, the debate over constructivism in IRhas reached the critical mass and the degree of productiveness that make acertain approach valuable to any discipline. To the extent that this is true, thediscussion within IR does not need to engage with (or import) debates overconstructivism from other fields and disciplines. Nevertheless, it may be usefulto offer, as an explicit conclusion, a few ideas as to how this program mightproceed in the future, from the vantage point of a discipline like science andtechnology studies, which from its origin and for several decades has beenshaped by different versions of constructivism.

First, in most social scientific disciplines, constructivism is associated withan interest in knowledge. In IR, this interest often has taken the shape of anepistemologicaldebate, frequently pitting positivist against antipositivist accountsof theory formation and of the explanatory power of our accounts of the world.This is the sort of debate that Alexander Wendt has in mind when he encouragesconstructivist and neoliberal scholars to see their affinities “through the smokeand heat of epistemology.”3 While emphasizing epistemology, constructivistsoften have neglectedepistemics—that is, how knowledge is produced anddeployed in practical interactionby the actors themselvesthat constitute theinternational system.

This is surprising, particularly because knowledge is a key notion, and oftenan unquestioned assumption, in the IR theories that constructivism aims tochallenge. Some sort of “knowledge in common” among international actors isa premise of rationalist theories, but “rationality” itself—as that which makesrational interaction possible—is generally left out of the theoretical reach ofrationalist approaches. Constructivism often has not followed thedynamicsofknowledge production and stabilization in the international system. The reasonfor this neglect might be because many constructivists resort to an oversocial-ized, rule-following, norm-governed actor as an alternative to the rationalistexplanations for the stability of the international system. There is little room inthat model for exploring the contingent acquisition and use of knowledge ininteraction. Many constructivists have substituted the internalization and appli-cation of norms for knowledge as the engine of social agency.

3Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction ofPower Politics,”International Organization46, No. 2 (1992), p. 425.

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A more explicit analysis of the role that social knowledge plays in the prac-tices of international relations and in the identities of their actors might help usto understand some of the conundrums of constructivism: the relationship betweenagency and structure, or the balance between contingency and stability. If westudy actors’ knowledge as produced in particular contexts of interaction, wemay understand in precise practical terms how and when actors’ understandingof the world is contingent. At the same time, knowledge about the world isclearly astabilizingelement in any kind of social order—it provides the assump-tions on which routine interaction rests. A greater emphasis on knowledge mighthelp us grasp in more specific terms the tension between contingency andstructure.

Second, a concern with the production and operation of knowledge in theworld is inseparable from the political constitution of the international socialorder. Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie made this point clearly in 1986,when they pointed out that “in the international arena, neither the processeswhereby knowledge becomes more extensive nor the means whereby reflectionon knowledge deepens are passive or automatic. They are intensely political.”4

It is unfortunate that those IR scholars, who have paid the most attention tothe dynamic process of knowledge production, persuasion, and communicationoften have done so at the expense of dealing with power and the political.Influenced by Habermasian notions of communicative action and of a “com-mon lifeworld,” Thomas Risse has argued that an emphasis on communicationand knowledge in interaction implies that the “relationship of power and socialhierarchies recede in the background.”5 Another body of work concerned withthe role of knowledge in international relations, the epistemic communitiesliterature, has been similarly reluctant to address the power dynamics that under-lie the establishment of expertise and epistemic authority.

It might be more useful for IR constructivism to explore how knowledgeand power are mutually constitutive or the processes by which epistemic legit-imacy and political legitimacy become intertwined in the international system.For many IR scholars, this turn might smack of “postmodernism.” Neverthe-less, it could also place constructivism in a better position to address the disci-pline’s core interest in power politics. It might eventually prove that there is noa priori contradiction in being a constructivistanda realist at the same time.

Third, what human actors produce through social interaction is not simplyideas, understandings, or identities (Theo Farrell’s “unobservables,” or the imma-terial elements of reality in Sterling-Folker’s argument), but also facts and arti-

4Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie, “International Organization: A State of theArt on the Art of the State,”International Organization40, No 4 (1986), p. 773.

5Thomas Risse, “Let’s Argue!: Communicative Action in World Politics,”Inter-national Organization54, No. 1 (2000), p. 7.

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facts, objects, and spaces—cases in which “construction” is more than ametaphor. That is, constructivism needs to address also the production of thematerialfabric of international society, along with actors’ ideas and knowledgeabout it. The field of science studies has engaged for some time with this dimen-sion of the social, and this engagement has proven fruitful in understandingsocial order.6 An obvious point of intersection of science studies and IR is thestudy of particular artifacts and technological systems that profoundly shapethe course of international politics and constitute the international system as weknow it. Donald MacKenzie’s study of nuclear missile guidance is a particu-larly central example of this body of work.7

In any case, these are all questions to be resolved in the practice ofdoingIR, and methodological challenges are in this sense as important as ontologicalones. I argue that constructivism isnot a paradigm that describes fixed rela-tionships between the social and the material, or between agency and structure.After all, these are questions to be answered for each particular case by empir-ical evidence. But constructivism can tell us what to look at when we are tryingto understand actions and structures. It can direct our analytical efforts towardconstitutive elements of international order that often have been overlooked intraditional IR. The more sophisticated our constructivist instruments, the richerthe image of the international system we will be able to produce.

6For a seminal treatment of the issue, see Bruno Latour, “Where Are the MissingMasses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Wiebe Bijker and John Law,eds.,Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change(Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

7Donald MacKenzie,Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Mis-sile Guidance(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

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